Cuba travel safety just shifted from cheap vacation to rapidly changing risk calculation. You’re comparing prices and Cuba wins. Lowest cost. Easy flight. Then the advisory drops. Wayne Smith, hospitality and tourism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, warns it can change really, really quickly, and politically there could be some fireworks there very, very quickly. You’re not booking a stable situation. You’re booking uncertainty that’s tough on their economy right now as people make different choices. Your credit card insurance that most people just use is actually usually pretty limited. You clicked “I agree” three times on Expedia without reading what it covers. Cuba is cash based economy. Brownouts getting more pronounced. Certain medications harder to come by these days.

Wayne’s specific protocol: bring US dollars and euros in small bills, not big bills. Take photocopy of your passport because if there’s brownouts and power outage or your phone gets stolen, you need hard copy. Bring extra medication and over-the-counter stuff because you may not be able to get it easily at just every drugstore. You can’t go get intoxicated and have too good of a time all by yourself and expect to walk home at 2:00 in the morning and be okay. Common sense shifts when infrastructure becomes unpredictable. Tourism being safety industry means when uncertainty increases, bookings shift to Portugal, Vietnam, South Korea instead.

The price reflects risk you can’t predict hour by hour. Specialized travel insurance plan costs 25 to 50 bucks per person for week in Caribbean. That’s the coverage gap between what you think you have and what actually pays when situation changes faster than you planned.

Topics: Cuba travel warnings, travel insurance coverage, vacation safety, cash economy tips, medical preparation, alternative destinations

GUEST:Wayne Smith | Professor, Hospitality and Tourism Management, Toronto Metropolitan University

Originally aired on2026-02-04